“We don’t have anything like this.” That’s one of the most frequent comments I hear when visitors from out of state come through my garden (entrance shown above) during Garden Walk Buffalo. They’re not talking about my plants. Oh, dear me, no. They’re talking about a large, free, uncurated city-wide garden event like ours.

To a surprising degree, out-of-staters are becoming a larger percentage of the people I see that last weekend of July. GWB weekend is now the climax of summer for us; we build up to it for months and afterward, there’s a sigh of relief, though also some sadness. 

And I have to admit it’s getting more and more difficult to imagine what the obstacles were when Garden Walk first started 30 years ago. It seems to have snowballed naturally, from about 25 gardens on a few adjacent blocks to a sprawling affair of 300plus gardens, about 5 miles across, where visitors must make deliberate choices about which neighborhoods to visit in any given year. 

GWB 25 photo by Jim Charlier

What is it about us that we’re such show-offs? In the past I have written about this event being as much to promote the beauties of urban living – not just concrete, sirens and litter – and it is. But I know from my fellow GWB gardeners that it is also about the people who come, the conversations we have and the pride of seeing hard work admired.

Buffalo may still be an outlier with this event, but it is catching on. Memphis has launched Experience Memphis Gardens, which started with the Cooper-Young Garden Walk in 2016 and went city-wide to include more neighborhoods and more gardens in 2023. During our annual garden bloggers’ Fling (which isn’t just bloggers any more), we saw many of these gardens and were able to walk from garden to garden, which isn’t always possible. These events often feature a number of single gardens, each requiring a bus ride. But parts of the Memphis Fling were much like GWB, which is no accident. Co-founder Kim Halyak drove up with her Pennsylvania-based sister to Garden Walk around 2014, and immediately fell in love. She decided to do what she could to replicate it in Memphis and actually told Buffalo-Niagara Gardening, a local online publication: “We’re going to be the Buffalo of the south That’s my goal.” 

It’s not one of those goals that you hear every day.

Memphis a little different, though,  in that about 260 Memphis gardens are open on Thursday, Saturday and Sundays in May through mid-June, but the gardens aren’t all open each day. It’s an entire calendar of neighborhood walks and events.

We kind of have that in Buffalo, with Open Gardens and various suburban and village walks throughout July, but most people are laser-focused on that one weekend. I think the idea of crowds of people walking through gardens seems collegial in some way. It’s a very friendly two days. 

I only got to see a tiny slice of the Memphis experience, but what I saw I loved: some of the Lenox neighborhood gardens. They’re a little like the small houses in Buffalo’s Cottage District, but the gardens participate in a purely Southern ambiance that I would be hard pressed to explain. There were narrow entryways (like mine, at top), opening up into (often) carefully designed tableaux, filled with plants, sure, but also with mysterious sculpture, small terraces, splashing water and that oh-so-necessary shade. 

I could say more about Memphis, but where Buffalo and Memphis most coincide is the come-see-us-you’ll-be-surprised exuberance and the community building that goes along with it. 

Kim Halyak experienced that surprise in Buffalo and wants others to feel the same in Memphis.